A little while ago, I carved out some time to finally file some records and CD’s…I’d been procrastinating, but I finally summoned up the discipline to get it done…and honestly, it was a task that should have taken all of fifteen minutes…

But it ended up taking longer than that because I kept stopping to examine the artwork and the liner notes of almost each and every compact disc and vinyl album…

I’d forgotten how much I was into looking at my music collection…what was the artist trying to get across with the artwork on the front?...on the back?...on the inside?...

Unless you’re still buying physical product, this is an experience that has been largely expunged from music culture…yes, there are digital liner notes and digital artwork and maybe you’re curious enough to check out the fields in the metadata after a right click on the file…but it’s just not the same…

If you’re of a more recent generation, there’s a chance that you’ve never bothered with artwork and liner notes because you’ve always lived a digital life—and you have no idea what I’m going on about…but if you’re into vinyl and CD’s, you’ll understand how much things have changed…

Yes, we must roll with the times, but the disappearance of old-school album artwork and liner notes has somehow diminished the music experience, just like how we’ve moved away from things like actual B-sides and bonus tracks…let me show you what I mean…this is digital debris part 2…
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Digital Debris Part 2: Album Artwork

Ongoing History of New Music looks at things from the alt-rock universe to hip hop, from artist profiles to various thematic explorations. It is Canada’s most well known music documentary hosted by the legendary Alan Cross. Whatever the episode, you’re definitely going to learn something that you might not find anywhere else. Trust us on this.

History

Society & Culture

Music

Music Interviews

Music Commentary

Music History

When something bad happens, we want to know why…the weirder and badder the event, the more we need to know…
It can’t possibly be random…someone needs to be responsible and held accountable…someone needs to be blamed…and there had better not be any loose ends…
Certain segments of the population have always been suspicious of the official story…forget the simplest of most logical explanation…these awful events or phenomenon’s are the work of some kind of secret cabal or organization pulling the strings of life on earth…it was a conspiracy…
For example, the most famous murder of modern times was the assassination of JFK on November 22, 1963…more than sixty years later, it seems like no one believes that lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman…
To be fair, they might be right…there’s been a lot of investigation into the JFK case over the decades…i’m one of those nuts who reads, watches, and listens to everything involved with the assassination…and I gotta tell you that i’m convinced this was the result of a loose need-to-know operation involving the CIA, the deep stage, Cuban exiles, and American mobsters…
There’s also something called “Occam’s razor” which dates back to the 14th century…this Monk—William of Occam—was annoyed at how people blamed supernatural forces when even the simplest thing went wrong…his answer to that was “look, the simplest and most obvious explanation is usually the correct one”…
But try that approach with people who believe the earth is flat and that we never went to the moon…Covid-19 was engineered by the media…and the Illuminati live beneath the Denver airport…
The world of conspiracy theories is a bottomless pit of weirdness…and when it comes to music, one of the deepest and strangest of these theories has to do with what happened above a greenhouse in Seattle on April 5, 1994…
Boy, have I got stories—multiple stories, in fact—about this one…in fact, it might be the most compressive study you’ve ever heard on the subject…this is uncharted: music and mayhem in the music industry, episode 12: it’s the ever-popular Kurt-Cobain-was-murdered theory…

Show contact info: 
X (formerly Twitter): @AlanCross
Website: curiouscast.ca
Email: Alan@alancross.ca
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Uncharted: The Ever-Popular Kurt-Cobain-Was-Murdered Conspiracy

Historians love to investigate causes and effects…it’s possible for a teeny-tiny seemingly inconsequential thing to set off a cascading series of events…and before you know it, the universe has changed forever…
Let me give you an example…a bunch of inept anarchists in Sarajevo were out to make a statement about the liberation of Bosnia and Herzegovina under occupation of the Austro-Hungarian empire…
When the Archduke Franz Ferdinand visited Sarajevo on June 28, 1914…two guys were set to toss a bomb at his six-vehicle motorcade, but they chickened out…then a guy named Nedeljko Cabrinovic threw a second bomb, but it bounced off the back of one of the cars…
The archduke, his wife, and the governor of Bosnia sped off—although the governor suggested that they take a slightly different route…the driver—Leopold Lojka—got confused and turned right instead of left into a very narrow street… 
When he tried to back up, the car stalled—and it stalled right in front of another member of the anarchist group named Gavril Princip…up until that second, he’d been discouraged that the assassination plot had failed and had allegedly slinked off to schiller’s delicatessen to get a sandwich and sulk about the afternoon’s failures…
(that’s not true, by the way…it just makes for a better story)…
Anyway, Princip’s target sitting directly in front of him, trapped…he pulled out his pistol and fired two shots…one hit the Archduke’s wife, killing her instantly…the other hit Ferdinand in the jugular…he died within half an hour…
This created a series of crises involving a web of alliances across Europe and within a few months, the great war had begun, resulting in the deaths of 20 million people and injured 21 million more…it led to the Treaty of Versailles , the humiliation of Germany, the rise of Adolf Hitler, the carnage of World War Two, the spread of Communism, the arms race, the cold war, and the world order as we know it…
If Leopold hadn’t hung a right instead of a left—or if you like the myth of Princip going for a sandwich—how would the 20th century have been different?...
Why am I recounting this?...because there are ways we can make connections like this in the world of rock….here…let me show you…
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Connections 2

For the first 60 years of the recorded music industry, things sounded awful…the quality of the recordings people had to put up with were terrible…the old 78 rpm records played on gramophones were no match when it came to hearing music live…we just didn’t have the technology to capture audio so that when we listened back, it sounded real…
That began to change in the late 1940s with the introduction of vinyl records: the 33 1/3 rpm vinyl album and the 7-inch 45 rpm single…it changed further with the switch to magnetic recording tape in the early 1950s…
New microphones, better tape machines, and further understanding of acoustics when it came to building recording studios…then came better turntables, amplifiers, and speakers…recorded audio started to sound more and more like the real thing…
In the middle 50s, people started to hear about something called “high-fidelity”…it was a marketing term invented by the audio industry to describe equipment capable of producing music properly…
Once stereo recordings came along in the late 50s, music fans went wild and started buying hi-fi gear for their homes…then their cars…and then for going mobile…
It was an endless pursuit for perfect sound, music that was loud, clean, clear, and accurate…meanwhile, recording studios were constantly in a state of retrofitting and refurbishment because artists demanded the best for their music…
That was the 1970s…in the 1980s, there was a reaction, a backlash, an artistic regression, after the introduction of the compact disc…for some, this music was too perfect, too shiny, too unreal…
They felt it contained none of the imperfections that made it human…beauty, they thought, was in the mistakes…that’s what made music authentic…audio quality mattered less than being able to listen to music that obviously came from the heart…
These music fans even had a name for this approach…if the best-sounding audio was high-fidelity, then what they wanted was the opposite: low-fidelity…and that aesthetic continues today…this is the history of Lo-Fi music…
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Lo-Fi: A History

In the summer of 2006, a young Calgary woman was on top of the world. She had a supportive family, amazing friends and a great job. But life as she knew it came to an abrupt stop in the middle of the night on August 6, 2006. In this episode, Global News senior crime reporter Nancy Hixt shares details of a violent attack- a story that’s every woman’s worst fear.
www.calgarycrimestoppers.org - reference case # 06274598
https://newsroom.calgary.ca/sexual-assault-case-from-2006-has-new-lead/
Contact:
Instagram: @nancy.hixt
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/NancyHixtCrimeBeat/
Email: nancy.hixt@globalnews.ca
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Introducing... Crime Beat | Out of the dark

Streaming is a very cool way to access tens of millions of songs with a few pokes on your phone…the idea of being able to listen to virtually any song from any era of human history with such ease is something akin to magic…
The downside of streaming is that it doesn’t provide any context to what we’re hearing…a continuous stream of music tells us nothing about the artist or the song…it’s just music, standing alone with nothing to anchor it to anything…
It was different in the old days…if you bought an album, dammit, that was an investment…you paid money for it, which created a fiscal relationship with the artist…that meant you were more likely to stick with an album and get deeper into the artist and the songs…otherwise, you had this nagging feeling you had wasted your money…
Context means so much to the enjoyment of music—which is probably a reason you’re listening to me right now…you want more than the notes that make up a song…
Yeah, sometimes a song is just a song…you know, it’s got a good beat, you can dance to it and maybe sing along…it doesn’t really mean anything more than that…
But some songs are very deep…they actually form some part of a historical record…they tell the story of real people, real events and the things that came after…
That’s where we’re going with this show: everything we’re about to hear is based on fact, on history, on actual events…and you may be shocked by the truth beyond songs that you’ve been digging all your life…this isn’t anything you’re gonna get from a stream…trust me…

Songs in this episode:

The Clash - White Riot
Boomtown Rats - I Don't Like Monday's
U2 - Sunday Bloody Sunday
REM - What's the Frequency Kenneth?
Pearl Jam - Jeremy
Nirvana - Polly
The Tragically Hip - Wheat Kings
Filter - Hey Man, Nice Shot!
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Digital Debris Part 2: Album Artwork

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